commodities such as timber, fishing, and whaling, and, given the good ports in the region, Atlantic commerce. This led to, at least in the first century of settlement, less inequality and less enslaved laborers. Slavery existed in New England, but generally more in the towns than on the small family farms that characterized the region. Perhaps the most significant difference between the two regions was the fact that many New England settlers came to the region out of religious motives. Many were Puritans and other dissenters who sought to establish a religious commonwealth. The Church of England was established in Virginia, but it was never as central to the colony's development as Puritanism was in New England, where religion undergirded politics, society, and culture.

Some similarities existed between the two regions, or at least the colonies that took root there. In both areas, at least some degree of representative government existed at the colonial level—the Virginia House of Burgesses was the first representative body in British America, and the New England colonies featured similar assemblies in addition to the famed town meetings. Initially at least, both sets of colonies were established by joint stock companies, and were responsible to their shareholders for turning a profit. Finally, both New England and the Chesapeake experienced violent conflicts with Native Americans over land. In the seventeenth century, Virginians defeated Native peoples in a series of conflicts known as the Powhatan Wars, and New Englanders nearly wiped out the region's Native populaion in the Pequot War and King Philip's War. In short, both New Englanders and Virginians violently expropriated Native American land when they were powerful enough to do so.